Card Hunter is a fabulous game, with far, far more attention to minute details than most game have- it's a game that expresses the love the creators have for the game in every facet, and one that attempts to provide a responsive user interface at every opportunity. Being brain-damaged, I usually stab myself in the foot any time I try to play a game; with a few exceptions, Card Hunter does its best to prevent me from being able to do so, all without limiting my gameplay options- to the contrary, it provides a pretty open play space compared to other games. Additionally, I've had interactions with the BlueManchu account [which I assume is Jon?], and Flaxative, on Kongregate. Both impressed me with their clarity of presentation, their responsiveness, their friendlyness, and general expression of competence. Paying $25 for what is, at the moment, almost entirely a cosmetic upgrade seemed a bit ridiculous- but at the same time, I had plenty of motivation to support the game. So when the pack hit Kongregate at a price I found more reasonable, I purchased it, diverting my full purchase allotment to the game. But I've no reason to actually activate it, at the moment- I've run three parties through the campaign, and I've no real reason to keep playing the game other than running the occasional Loot Fairy run. After all, the game has three fundamental flaws at the moment: 1: Quests are a confusion of developer intent. They don't provide experience, so they're not meant for additional parties to run through [and without adding class customization (ie 'tank' build would swap one warrior's weapon slots for an extra armor and shield slot) or additional classes and races, there's only so much play you can get out of the available builds anyway, without it getting dull- I mean, unless you DIDN'T run three parties through simultaneously like I did, but that's just silly~~] and they don't scale to top level range, so they're not meant for end-game play. So right now, there's no real motivation [for me] to run them. 2: There's no end-game. Regardless of how Quests will end up being targeted, some sort of end-game needs to be added [even if it's just some sort of randomized survival stage that you can keep repeating without daily cap]. The game seems to be scaled to a 100 level range (in terms of pacing, not design, compared to other strategy RPGs), so it seems likely there'll be additional content in the future, so that's not a major concern. However, at the moment, there's just absolutely nothing to do with a party once it hits cap, other than strip their gear and run quests below their level. Which really runs counter to the entire thrill of an RPG game, in my experience, which involves getting a build to their full potential and then facing them off at their best against challenges. And finally: 3: The current level-to-quest-scaling system is annoying as heck. No, I mean, it's great it's included. It's yet another player-catering game mechanism that I appreciate. But the implementation itself is frustrating- and perhaps that's because I'm misunderstanding the Store characters mechanism, and you all'll point out that this feature already exists, but otherwise: Instead of having to manually reequip gear after each run, any time you run a character underlevel and it pops you into the 'you don't have enough power tokens, regear your toon before continuing' screen, it needs to save your existing gear configuration, and then when the quest chain is done, reequip your old gear at the final chest screen. I mean, obviously I'm specialized in my concerns here- being brain-damaged, I have very limited memory functions. So it's a constant nuisance of having to write down what my characters had equipped, and then sorting through my rather pack-ratty gear selection to find the gear again. Maybe it's not all that much of an issue, but it really feels like it'd be far better implemented with the setup I described~ Anyway, those are my concerns- As to the Basic Edition, I'll just wait till there's some more top level content offerings for my parties to play [so as to not waste the Card Hunter Club- always an issue with static time based boosts (versus, say, quests run, or active time in game)] Guess that just means I'll have to keep sticking around till then
Had you already bought the treasure hunts? Because if not, there's a very noncosmetic reason to active your basic edition: it'll give you something like 11 entirely new missions to play! Anyway thanks for your feedback. Some other users have complained about quests not giving XP ... and I'm inclined to agree with them/you
11, if memory serves. I think something most people don't think about going into quests is that sometimes the best way to beat a quest is to have a lower than max leveled team (such as level 4 wizards), if quests gave XP it would require buying new wizards and leveling them up to level 4 over and over and over again! I'm so glad that quests didn't give XP when I was completing them!
Sorry, let me reclarify: The treasure hunts fill much the same role as the Quests do; and most of their guaranteed loot is really un-compelling- to the point that I'd almost always prefer a random epic treasure in each case [the AoA treasure hunts are an exception, with most of its loot being interesting. Sort of feels like when you all did the rebalance pass, the old treasure hunts didn't get considered?]. But that being said, no, I'm mostly holding off on those till I have reason to use the Card Hunter club, since the treasure hunts wouldn't even make a dent in a month's worth of play time, and as I noted, the Card Hunter Club isn't exactly the most user-friendly set up, in terms of it being static time based and auto-activating with the basic subscription activation (instead of letting me just activate treasure hunts and save the Club membership till later, or basing membership use on actual time spent playing (eg, only subtracts 1 day if you log in that day)). Static time boosts are a pretty standard thing, so it's understandable if that isn't a rework that'll be considered, but unfortunately it ties in poorly to the other [perceived flaws] I listed (Which is mostly to say, limited content access). Of course, that means that if those are addressed, then the level of complaint in regard to the set up of the club will diminish, as well. As far as the experience gain on Quests, I'm not pushing for that persay, but saying that's one possible solution to their seeming lack of focus. If we get more top level content [especially repeatable challenges, as I gave suggestion to], then yes, that's probably the best approach to make Quests interesting. If there's a leveling preference related to certain objectives like Scarponi mentioned, perhaps a menu option [Auto-Level Characters/Manually Level Characters] could be added, which would cap characters at their current level while toggled, until the player manually clicks a level up button. Though I thought you'd just level down automatically, anyway, so I'm a bit confused as to the consideration that's being expressed.
Keeping a character at a low level isn't just for the level down quests. A low level character has less item slots so you have a higher chance of seeing key cards. This is especially important for 1 hp quests where the hp handicap of low level characters is irrelevant.
Oh, I hadn't even considered that it would still use your base item slots [eg, Walkx3 for racial]. Yeah, that's a pretty profound handicap to the characters, unless you've some excellent rarity non-token-requiring gear selections. :/ Great point :X
Ok. Because they introduce new stories, new monsters, and new cards, I think of them as separate, hence my comment. Cheers.
Sorry, but no. You're misunderstanding what was being said. Using level 4 characters in higher-level adventures is not about leaving item slots empty (that's almost never a good idea). The point is that level 4 characters only have a few item slots at all. For example, a level 4 wizard only has 6 item slots, e.g. only one Staff slot, and only has 21 cards in her deck (instead of the full 36). Like Peonprop said, this thinned deck makes it much easier to draw your best cards which is vital especially in quests.
You know, I found this confusing and weird when I noticed it anyway. Is there a particular reason why leveling down characters shouldn't also reduce their slots to the usual number for that level? It would make more sense, and remove the need to create excess characters and level them to some arbitrary point.
That would help in some cases, but there are other places where you want chars that are lower level than what they would be de-leveled to. Manual leveling is an interesting idea, but the XP formula is currently based on the char's level, so should we keep using that or use accumulated XP? And explaining it to new players will be challenging.
Different topics, hun, though I appreciate your viewpoint there [I didn't pick up that you were expressing non-mechanical considerations before] Hm. I mean more, they're still not filling the role of being repeatable top-level content, I'd still have to shuffle gear around a ton, or run new parties, to play them; and then I clarified that even if I went and ran new parties, I'd still beat them all with too much time left on the Card Hunter Club to make it feel efficient; and that the loot gain from the quests wasn't much of a draw, either. No, I totally appreciate that they're likely incredible interesting to play, and more content is inherently better, but I was just saying, as it relates to activating the subscription, it still doesn't bypass the issue that I can't activate just the treasure hunts without activating the Club as well Edit: Tl;dr version: Even activating the treasure hunts won't give me anything to run my top level parties on [other than the level 17 quests I'm already farming daily], nor anything worth running more than once, at least as far as mechanical gain (versus level design appeal) is concerned. Actually, you're misunderstanding me I'm suggesting that items that both don't require power tokens and aren't epic or better, aren't much better than being ungeared. I was trying to say that, regardless of if you go naked or just with basic gear, you're doing a lot worse than if you had less slots. My suggestion was to simply have the actual level up be stalled, meaning you'd be at 100% to the next level, but it wouldn't take you farther unless you manually toggled the level up. And since the manual/automatic leveling option would be in the menu options, it theoretically wouldn't be in much need of explaining for new players (Just have a tooltip that notes new players should keep it on automatic), since it's more a consideration for players who are far enough along to be running Quests.
Automatic de-levelling is something we talked about for a long time during development but we never had the time to do it properly. The lack of it is a weak point of the game, I agree.
There's a response I can appreciate Thanks for your continued dedication. points to the second paragraph at the very top I'm not exactly known for being able to phrase things so that they're easily understood, unfortunately. My apologies
No need to apologize, the misinterpretation was mine alone. All the information was there had I but looked at it with enough care. Your considered posts deserve more attention than I gave at the time. For that I apologize.
